Tag: business

Most of us rarely have to build or manage budgets in our organizations, but almost all of us are affected by the budget process. It’s tempting to ignore budgets and just do your job, but sooner or later you might find yourself arguing for more funding for a project, training, or even hardware.

I ran across a short piece on 10 ways to shrink your IT budget and found it a bit scary. I would bet that many of you have had conversations, or been affected by decisions, that follow some of the advice in the piece. The push for open source, virtualization, hosted (or cloud) migrations, or more can cause stress and anxiety when your job is making sure the servers run without complaints from end users.

I don’t expect that all of these would be followed in a specific organization, but some of these might be proposed to you. What I would recommend is you understand the reasons why, or why not, you might adopt any of these ideas. Certainly the time lost from retraining people or rewriting code can overwhelm the savings for many years, but even seemingly smaller changes, like changing priorities can affect the way your clients and customers view IT. It seems that sometimes budgets get changed to provide a short term view that technology spending is being managed efficiently, only to find out later we will remove all our savings by undoing a poor decision.

I’d suggest that you approach budget issues with transparency and honesty. Take a hard look at your costs and determine what items are really needed, and what items aren’t. However, I’d also urge you to carefully consider whether it’s really valuable to save money by not taking care of your staff. While labor is an expensive part of your IT cost, good staff are worth much more than they cost, often by an order of magnitude.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

Many people know that a good manager can make a huge difference in the productivity of a staff. A bad manager can also lower productivity, but only to an extent. Fear of losing a job, or avoiding punishment can motivate plenty of staff to get work done, even when you have a poor, or even absent, manager.

Some companies don’t value strong management skills much, some do. I think most of us would prefer to work for a company that does, but we don’t always get the choice. That’s one reason why I do promote the idea of branding yourself and ensuring you have other options for employment. The more options you have, and the more demand there is for your staff’s services, the more likely that your company will make an effort to work with, rather than lord over, their employees.

For those of you that are managers, or those that might want to help their manager build some skills, I ran across an interesting story from David Haney on his experiences as a manager at StackOverflow. It’s a good set of principles that I tried to keep in mind as I managed people in the past. For those managers that might not know why their staff leaves, there’s a good warning that good IT staff are in short supply, and companies should make an effort to retain them in various ways.

For many of us in the IT sector, we can provide a strategic advantage for our businesses as we enhance and extend software. Many of us are important insurance that keep systems running, hopefully at a peak level. Bad management can impact the effectiveness of our technology organizations, and it’s silly to accept bad managers. This is something that can be fixed with some training and accountability for the manager, with a little effort. Make a few suggestions, or try to show how a better manager (or style) might help you get more done.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

I know a little something about building and scaling a system on the Internet. While SQLServerCentral isn’t the largest site out there, we’ve had lots of experience with growing a site while trying to manage a business. We were successful at it for years before Redgate Software purchased the site. I’d like to think we’ve continued to run the site successfully and balance the commercial needs with our goal of hosting a world class SQL Server community that educates the community on a daily basis.

I thought back about our history and the way things have gone while reading an article on Github and some of the challenges they have faced they they try to build a business from their (primarily) free service. I certainly hope they succeed as I really like the Github model and only hope their investors are as enlightened and visionary as the founders of Redgate.

There are constant challenges in running a business. No matter how good your intentions, the pressure to break even or turn enough of a profit to survive are always there. At the same time, there is just as much pressure from ethical business owners to keep their customers’ and clients’ expectations and needs in the forefront of their minds as they run their business.

I have struggled with this regularly at SQLServerCentral and still do today. Serving the community while providing value for my boss (or making a profit to pay my salary in the past) are two conflicting goals. I think that things have worked out well, but I am constantly striving to maintain some balance between what is best for all.

I do hope GitHub and many of the low cost services are able to transition and survive as they mature as businesses. Even if many of them can’t continue to provide the same services for free, I hope customers see enough value to pay for some level of service, and the sites survive.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.